With the latest pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger," Apple's Safari Web browser has gained support for additional file formats while the company's Spotlight technology continues to conquer new territory through the OS.

In the most recent builds of the forthcoming OS, Apple has revised its Navigation Services (open and save dialog boxes) to seamlessly incorporate the search technology. In addition to a built-in Spotlight search field, the dialogs sport a Spotlight location bar to further refine searches, effectively reducing the time and patience required to locate files in the file system.

Meanwhile, sources are reporting several other changes to Tiger since the first pre-release of the system, which was distributed in June. By default, screenshots are now saved in PNG format, as opposed to PDF. Additionally, an update to the Tiger's Safari Web browser will display PDF and Postscript documents without the need for a third party plug-in.

Sources have also noted the addition of multiple iChat accounts in the most recent builds of iChat 3.0, a forthcoming update to Apple's instant message software. iTunes integration also remains as an option in the application—albeit non-functional—but tabbed chats have yet to surface.

Apple this weekend seeded Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger build 8A294 to its general developer population, and followed up with a slightly modified release of the same build, which was delivered to employees and trusted third party affiliates on Monday.

Update: iTunes integration in the latest builds of iChat 3.0 does in fact function properly, but requires last week's release of iTunes 4.7.

All I can say is, its about time. I know there is a lot going on with the WebCore team but wouldn't they consider all the PDF talk going on with Quartz that they would natively support PDF and Postscripts documents inline? Ah well, better late then never.

PNG Screenshots

Very nice. For those that haven't invested in 3rd party screen-capture utilities (myself) I'd love to see a return to a lossless compression format for screen and window captures.

Great additions, although depending on how well they integrate PDFs with Safari, Schubert it might be losing mindshare.

The addition of Spotlight to Open/Save dialogs makes a LOT of sense and I really like it.

One thing I would like to see in Navigation Services (Open/Save dialogs) is the ability to rename files within those dialogs. That ability has been in Windows for a long time, and I don't think it would be a bad thing for it to exist in Mac OS, as well.

Originally posted by kim kap solPNG is lossless. Or did I not understand what you were saying?

Previous versions of OS X used TIFF (IIRC) then they moved to PDF which is lossy. At least in some of the examples I had at the time they showed artifacts under closer inspection. Now they will be returning to a lossless (PNG) format.